Resilience : Theory: Consciousness and Intelligence

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A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

12 : Consciousness and Intelligence

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Consciousness (sentience) and intelligence exist at all levels of our organism, not just in the brain/mind. i.e. each nerve, each muscle cell, each organ, each "system" of the body has an intelligence and consciousness (or sentience) of its own.

Meeting innate and primal survival agendas – whilst also attending to both internal and external environmental needs – requires multi-layered communication and meaning-making at all levels of biology. The new science of Biosemiotics [1] has analysed the process of communication and meaning-making in detail and found it so inherently complex – that consciousness (sentience) and intelligence must necessarilyexist at all levels of our organism, not just in the brain/mind. i.e. each nerve, each muscle cell, each organ, each "system" of the body, even each organelle within a single cell, has an intelligence and consciousness of its own - the interactive multi-layered totality of which might be called the "body-mind".

Characteristics such as self-identity, decision-making, memory and intelligence may be observed in the behaviour of single cells. So these attributes (maybe not in a form we would immediately recognise) are present in the smallest of life-forms, were present from the very beginnings of evolution, and the physical biology has also co-evolved within a conscious intelligent framework from the very start.

These cellular organic consciousnesses can be in several states:

part of a greater whole,
of themselves (aware of other), and
self-referential (more than one internal frame of reference, e.g. "myself and my body" or "my adult and my inner child", or "part of me likes this but another part doesn’t"),
and maybe two or three of these simultaneously,

… creating an almost infinite number of possible relational configurations. The possibilities are contained within the form (the anatomy and the physical neurological, biochemical, mechanical etc. processes). So whilst the form constricts the ways that consciousness may interrelate to express itself, there is an almost infinite potential for changes in self-referential organisation within something that appears to be limited and fixed by its physicality.

The more general issue of consciousness extends out from in-dividuals to the whole cosmos. Jung was only one of many psychologists, philosophers, physicists (and more recently semioticists) who have recognised the necessity for an extended field (or something of that ilk) of a base-level of consciousness that permeates everything.

References & Notes

1 American mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce originally devised Semiotics as a scientific description of human communication. More recently, it has been expanded to include all living systems - in Biosemiotics and Ecosemiotics – see Barbieri M. (2008). Biosemiotics: a new understanding of life. Die Naturwissenschaften , 95(7), 577–599. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-008-0368-x andTimo Maran & Kalevi Kull (2016) Ecosemiotics: main principles and current developments. Geografiska Annaler : Series B, Human Geography 96(1) 10 Nov Pages 41-50 https://doi.org/10.1111/geob.12035 . Semiotics (human communication) is now considered a subset of Biosemiotics. As living organisms, we inevitably organise all communication (at a human, social, or organic level) to suit our biological reality. Throughout evolution, life has discovered and deployed the most efficient communication forms that are suited to its purposes. Human communication systems and modes of communication (music, language, art, architecture, digital technologies) essentially imitate forms of information exchange that already exist in the evolved living world.